1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns a radiation detector arrangement for a medical diagnostic apparatus, a medical diagnostic system with such a detector arrangement, as well as a medical imaging diagnostic method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various imaging diagnostic methods are known in the field of medicine, such as, for example, computed tomography (CT), in which the patient to be examined is irradiated with x-rays from a number of different directions and the x-rays are detected by a detector as projection datasets, which are combined for generation of an image.
In addition to this method based on x-ray radiation, what are known as nuclear medicine methods also are known such as, for example, PET diagnostics (positron emission tomography) and SPECT diagnostics (single photon emission computed tomography). In each of these modalities, the patient is injected with a radioactive substance and the radiation emanating from this substance is detected with the detector and used for image processing.
For precise spatial resolution of the point of origin of the emitted or transmitted radiation, collimators are disposed upstream of the detectors, the collimators being formed by a number of individual collimator plates (known as septa (singular: septum) that are oriented so that essentially only radiation portions incoming perpendicularly on the detector surface are detected. Therefore only a part of the total radiation is used for the image generation. In order to have sufficient information for the image generation, the patient therefore must be exposed with a relatively high radiation dose.